November 22, 1999
Stigma
This is going to be a very long short week. No Jo this week, and in fact, next week is her last week here. It sucks immensely for so many different reasons. We have three temps working in my department now. Three temps out of a six-person department. And nobody is as funny as she is. Who else is gonna help me poke fun at corporate life around here? I might have to start reading Dilbert or something. For the record, this wasn't a very Dilbert-ish place to work when I first started here. But the company's doubled in size since then, and the bigger it gets, the more Dilbertesque it becomes.
I started thinking on Friday that it might be time for me to move on as well. I feel like I could honestly do better, but I don't know at what. I've got a lot of skills and I learn so damn fast... but I don't know what to look for. We get our annual bonus checks in February. I'm definitely not leaving until after that.
I'm tired of the crap here, though. And believe me, there's a lot of crap. I'm tired of dealing with people on the phone and trying to help them through a rather inefficient support system, and I'm tired of suggestions for improvement not being listened to. I'm not sure where the change came, but once I felt like management listened to me here. Not anymore. The support manager smiles and nods and I watch everything I suggest go right in one ear and out the other. I'm just a receptionist, after all, what do I know? Never mind that I've been here longer than the vast majority of the support reps.
But damn it, I'm not 'just a receptionist'. I know for a fact I'm smarter than my supervisor, and most of the support department. I can do better than this job, in terms of salary, in terms of job satisfaction, in terms of just having a job where my talents are not only utilized, but even just recognized for what they are.
There are a lot of good things here. The money is definitely decent, especially for the no-brainer job I do. The workload is light enough that I can spend a good part of my day doing my own projects -- writing, web design, whatever. Benefits are really good.
But I can't get past the stigma lately. I feel like people look at what I do and draw conclusions about who I am and what my abilities are. In fact, thinking about it, I've felt extremely stigmatized lately. By my job. By my lack of formal education. It's made me very defensive about the whole thing. This isn't helped by the fact that I seem to keep running into college students who are very much into the whole 'I am a college student, therefore I know more than everyone' mentality. I find it terribly irritating and feel it to be my self-appointed duty to burst their bubbles whenever possible.
It also renews my determination to self-educate myself as much as humanly possible. Brand said a great thing to me yesterday, after hearing that I'd finally finished The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy. He said, "Congratulations, you now know more about philosophy than a lot of the people in my doctoral classes." I think he might have been exaggerating, but it made me feel good anyway.
I know I've been over-sensitive about this lately. But my intelligence is something that has always been a defining characteristic of who I am, of how I see myself, and lately it feels like everyone and their brother is running that part of me into the ground.
Posted by Lisa at November 22, 1999 05:55 PM
